" The Third Baath Coup?If, as I have argued, the Baathists along with some Salafi (Sunni fundamentalist) allies are behind the guerrilla war, what do they want? They want to drive the Americans out of Iraq and make a third Baath coup, putting the Shiite genie back in its bottle and restoring Sunni Arab primacy.A third Baath coup is no more inherently implausible than the first two. The Baathists probably have access to some 250,000 tons of munitions which are still missing. They know how to use them, and have been the managerial class, and many are Iran-Iraq War and Gulf War veterans with substantial military experience.As long-time readers know, I have long held a position similar to that enunciated by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter's assessmentthat the lion's share of violence in Iraq is the work of Baathist military intelligence and military gone underground, and that the tendency to blame everything on Zarqawi and a handful of foreigners is a propaganda move that suits both the Baath mukhabarat and the Bush administration. AP correspondent in Baghdad, Borzou Daragahi, makes much the same argument.Only 6 percent of the fighters captured at Fallujah were foreigners, and Fallujah anyway had long had a high foreign-born population, being a frontier and desert port. By Baath I don't necessarily mean committed ideological Baathists, but the party was how they were formed politically, along with networks of clientelage based in the Sunni Arab heartland.The Baath has been systematically killing members of the new political class. This is visible at the provincial level. The governors of Diyala and Baghdad provinces have recently been killed. The killing and kidnapping of members of the provincial governing councils go virtually unremarked in the US press but are legion. A female member of the Salahuddin GC was kidnapped and killed recently. The police chiefs of many cities have been killed or kidnapped, or members of their family have, such that many more have just resigned, often along with dozens of their men. The US is powerless to stop this campaign of assassination.And this is my problem with the idea of just having the US suddenly withdraw its military from Iraq. What is to stop the neo-Baath from just killing Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Ibrahim Jaafari, Iyad Allawi (who is rumored not to sleep in the same bed twice), etc., all the members of the provincial councils and the new parliament, and then making a military coup that brings the party and its Sunni patronage networks back to power?I think this coup would look more like the failed 1963 effort than like 1968, and has the potential to roil the country and the region for decades. The tanks and helicopter gunships and chemical weapons that the Sunni Arab minority regime used to put down the other groups are gone, and it is not clear that car bombs, Kalashnikovs and sniping could substitute for them. They can probably take the Green Zone and the television stations if the US abruptly withdraws, but could they really put down the South effectively again?For this reason, I fear I think the US is stuck in Iraq. Sistani clearly fears a Sunni Arab coup, as well, and this is one reason he has not acted forcefully to end the military occupation, which he deeply dislikes.Is the Neo-Baath Coup scenario one that the US could live with?"MY COMMENTS:

A Neo-Baathist Iraq – which really means an Iraqi version of Sierra Leone or Somalia is not in American interests. Or in the interests of any of Iraq’s neighbors except perhaps Syria who would gain influence in the Sunni heartland.

Cole has correctly identified, in my view, some key truths about the situation in Iraq. That most our enemies there are driven by the idea of Sunni-Baathist resurgence. That they recruit along lines of family-clan-tribe clientage networks. That the brain of the insurgency are the surviving elements of Saddam’s SSO, Mukhabarat, MI, Special Republican Guard and Fedayeen who are following the old Soviet unconventional warfare doctrine of Spetsnaz forces ( hardly unexpected since Baathist Iraq had a Soviet model military establishment grafted on to a ME society with a decades long relationship with the USSR and Russia ). Soviet Spetsnaz doctrine called for “ Deep Operations”:

“At this crisis stage, the Soviets will put these forces[ Spetsnaz sleeper units] into play. From the outset, the ultimate Soviet objective will be the total political collapse or neutralization of key NATO governments.5 Because frontal military assaults would be less effective in accomplishing this, Soviet strategy emphasizes the need for initial operations in the enemy's rear echelon, the domain of Spetsnaz forces whose operations are intended to sow the seeds of a political-military collapse. Indeed, the Soviets' aim is to prevent the formation of a static, frontline war with NATO on one side and Warsaw Pact forces on the other.6 Therefore, the Soviets intend to infiltrate NATO's rear area before the outbreak of hostilities to begin eroding NATO's political and military structure from within” ( Campbell, Captain Erin E., USAF. Aerospace Power Journal 1988)

Soviet Spetsnz unit personnel however, like the Zarqawri Jihadis, were atomized individuals. The neo-Baathist Iraqi insurgents are not, as Cole pointed out with his reference to clientage networks. You catch and identify one individual chances are extremely high that other adult males linked to the captive by family and marriage ties are also involved. This is the insurgencies Achilles heel. This is also why aggressive Counterinsurgency tactics will put a dent in the insurgency, the culprits are naturally more identifiable unlike with Marxist guerilla movements.

The political bullet to bite is that we have to accept that a fairly significant portion of Iraqi Sunnis are really " the enemy" now in the same sense that the Germans and Japanese were during WWII and act accordingly. Some of this is our fault for mishandling the occupation but mostly its a vicious group of political gangsters determined to shoot their way back to power and dominance over the Kurds and Shiites. Let's stop sugarcoating things and face reality - the Sunnis by and large want a new dictatorship that will secure their priviliges once again.

Any prospects for broad-based democracyin Iraq will fail- or even maintaining Iraq's territorial integrity - unless we can isolate the more politically backward Sunni dominated areas from the rest of Iraq and put the insurgency on the defensive.

I am not confident - which is to say I think it is entirely impossible - that the US has the necessary eyes and ears for a successful counterinsurgency. A successful counterinsurgency needs good intel to seperate and penetrate, as well as a stable core native government base. There is none in Iraq.

The US position looks very much like that of the French, ex the settlers, in Algeria, except even the French had a good solid core set of local collaborators. Don't forget that. The harkis did not suffer for nothing.

ok, Somalia was a sloppy analogy on my part, more used as a short-hand for a failed state. By Sierra Leone I was alluding to the tendency for anarchic 4GW forces to spill-over in to neighboring states as they did in West Africa where the ECOMOG peacekeepers ended up drawing the rebel forces back to their home countries, destabilizing an arc of nations.

Lebanon was probably a step-up if I recall properly, they at least had a nominal legitimate government presiding over the warring militias - Iraq does not have even that yet.

Counterinsurgency teams should be relatively small with fluent ( social context too, not just linguistics)translators in each team. MI suport for Counterintelligence teams would require, rough guess, minimum 50 additional good fluent analysts for sifting intel. I could be underestimating though. Can we scrape such a group together from CENTCOM,State,IC and PMC without impairing other critical priorities ? I don't know. Damn sad if we can't manage that kind of task force at this stage.

Re: Algeria - I understand your point to a limited extent because the Foreign Legion paras had a far freer hand and more local experience in this kind of work and the French still lost ( or probably would have if DeGaulle had not cut his losses and pulled the plug)Very brutal group.

I am afraid that I think that, no, the US can not scrape the necessary together.

Worse, the real countintel should be supported by a solid core native group. That clearly is not avail in Iraq.... at the moment.

In re Algeria: I am also refering to the Algerians who fought, out of choice, for the French. The French had good native penetration, still lost since their did not have a good core of a counterweight to the ideological side of the insurgency.

I have occasional email contact with a friend of a friend in Iraq doing real counterintel work with Iraqis. He sounded terribly burnt out and annoyed in his last contact at the Army non -spec op types who would not move on his intel in a timely fashion unless things were 100% certain, which by that time leads are often getting stale.

On the other hand, he's there voluntarily at a very high rate of pay, second time out so he knew what he was buying.

An alternative would be to find, negotiate with and sponsor a Ba'athist candidate that would work with the West, and put them into power. If all they are interested in is power, status and an opportunity to pillage the national treasury then, in the grand scheme of things, that should not interfere with the West's strategic interests in the region. A certain amount of window-dressing may be necessary, but it could be done (remember the Ribbontrop-Molotov agreement). It would be a betrayal of the ordinary people of Iraq, but possibly they may have to be betrayed anyway.

I would argue that everyone was betrayed by the criminally incompetent, mind bogglingly incompetent"post war" efforts, and even more so by the blindingly stupid insistence (enabled by far too many dogmatic Right Bolsheviks) that everything was/is going fine.

What infuriates me is there are still pollyanish idiots trying to claim Iraq is going better than it looks. It bloody well isn't and only by understanding that and getting serious (rather than blaming some idiotic Left for one's problems) is it going to get fixed.... well it's probably too late, but...